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First POST: Doggieleaks

Thursday, April 19 2012

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: The dogpile grows as Mitt Romney and Barack Obama's campaigns feud over who's the better pet owner; ahead of a planned Friday day of action, activists pushing for the arrest of international criminal Joseph Kony get a new sign of support from federal lawmakers; and more in today's First POST, a round-up of news about technology in politics from around the Web.

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First POST: Doggieleaks

As discussion about Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's relationships to dogs continued yesterday, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown is joining in as well by releasing a video of his dogs, Koda and Snuggles.

The creator of Dogs Against Romney explained his view on the new dog controversy on the site's blog.

I woke up early this morning to my phone ringing. It was a reporter, wanting to know the reaction of Dogs Against Romney to "new information" brought up by Romney campaign operatives....If President Obama had made the conscious decision to eat dog meat as a 36-year old adult, in America, claimed the dog liked being eaten, and still claimed he didn't think there was anything wrong with it, the Romney campaign would have a point and my pack would be on the president like a pack of wild, well....dogs.But that isn't what happened.

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney said that the election will be about "jobs not dogs." The entire dog story also sparked a strange spin-off when the AP tweeted: "Are you a dog owner? AP would like to talk to you for an article." The tweet has since been deleted, and it is not clear if it had anything to do with Romney and Obama, but it quickly sparked mock reactions on Twitter such as: "Do you know when a joke has jumped the shark? I'd like to talk to you for an article."

"Kony 2012" had an impact, day of action or no

U.S. lawmakers want to increase the State Department's rewards for justice program to apply to warlord Joseph Kony. According to the A.P. several senators will release a video today on U.S. support for the efforts to capture Kony.

A reporter who recently reported on the Ugandan army's hunt for Kony for Newsweek was answering questions on Reddit yesterday.

While we were there a Kony 'spokesperson' issued a 19-page response to Invisible Children's movie, and the AU and US participation. It was mostly rambling, non-sensical. But you got the sense they're keeping an eye on things. Oddly, the LRA has a lot of supporters who are part of the diaspora in Europe. One hears from them now and again. ...

After Hezbollah interview, Greenwald defends Assange

Glenn Greenwald writes that American media criticism of Julian Assange's TV talk show is unfair and biased. Assange's first interview for a TV show airing on the Kremlin-connected network Russia Today was the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Around the Web

The Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing next week about how online video services like Netflix and Hulu are affecting the future of television. Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said he's holding the hearing because "everything about television is changing," according to The Hill.

Rep. Edward Markey (D - Mass.) thinks there are still unanswered questions about data that Google collected from home wireless networks and is requesting that Congress hold a hearing on the matter. The Electronic Privacy Information Center has sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder requesting an investigation into Google's actions and why it impeded an Federal Communications Commission inquiry. Google has been fined for holding up the investigation.

The Guardian looks back on the day of action against SOPA as an example of a changing world. Dominic Rushe talks to folks who say it's not about Hollywood versus Silicon Valley or silicone versus cellulose — it's about a media environment where content travels far faster than copyright:

But trying to blame Google or even to cast this as a battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is to misrepresent a major shift in the media landscape, say those pushing for a more open internet.

Elizabeth Stark, a free culture advocate who has been campaigning for a relaxation of copyright law for years, says the Sopa battle will be seen as a landmark in a much wider debate about the open nature of the internet compared with the closed, copyright-protected world from before the digital age.

House Republicans are resisting White House pressure to legislate a requirement for some private providers of critical infrastructure to take steps to bolster their cybersecurity, The Hill reports. The Hill's Brendan Sasso writes that senior administration officials are pushing for the language to be included in the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, which the White House has also obliquely argued does not do enough to protect the privacy of individual citizens. As it now stands, CISPA would pave the way for information sharing between some private companies and the government without adding any mandates for the private sector.

The former executive assistant director of the criminal, cyber, response and service branch of the FBI has taken a job with the start-up Crowdstrike to help protect private-sector computer networks, in part, he said, because the government doesn't have the authority to monitor such Internet traffic to .com domains. The former official also said that several countries with the ability to mount online attacks are looking to infiltrate U.S. corporate and military computer systems.

Inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee believes Internet users should demand access to the data that web services such as Facebook and Google collect about them so that users themselves can apply it for personalized computer services. Meanwhile, Google executive Sergey Brin says his comments to the Guardian about the role of government and Internet companies in maintaining Internet freedom were somewhat distorted.

The French Poll Commission plans to announce on Friday how it will prevent exit poll leaks from social media and traditional media outlets after the newspaper Liberation suggested it might ignore the embargo:

"The aim is to protect the last voter to vote," a commission member told Reuters, without specifying what the measures would be. However, there is little the commission can do to prevent people from consulting the websites of media in Belgium and Switzerland which routinely report exit polls in French election in the hours before results are officially published from 8 p.m. (1800 GMT). Polls close at 6 p.m. though in big cities it is 8 p.m.

Italian bloggers are upset as a minister appears to be reintroducing legislation that would require all online publications to correct information on their websites within 48 hours of a complaint or face fines of €12,000. The bill was first introduced a few years ago but withdrawn after coming under fire.

The Social Democrats campaigning in the German state of Northrhine-Westphalia encouraged supporters to submit poster designs, which were then put up to a vote on Facebook. The winner: a poster with the message: Curry Sausage is SPD and an image of curry sausage, created by two students. According to local reports, the reaction is mixed, but the General Secretary of the state party said, "Whoever engages with the net, has to live with the results."

Glyn Moody at Computerworld UK obtained documents through WhatDoTheyKnow, a site that helps citizens submit and track requests for information under the UK's freedom of information laws, about meetings that Microsoft had with British government officials as it lobbied against government use of open standards in information technology.

A former assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan police now advising the Bahraini government dismissed reports of violence in the country ahead of a Formula One race, the Guardian reported. He said: "There's allegations that people are arrested and not taken to the police station but go to these holding sites where allegedly terrible things happen. But that would be on YouTube. That would be posted."

Al Akhbar says it will begin publishing a series of documents obtained from hacking into the e-mail account of Syrian National Council president Burhan Ghalioun. According to Al Akhbar, the documents were obtained from opponents of the Syrian opposition leader in response to a recent hacking of Syrian President Assad's e-mail.

There have been thousands of attempts to hack into Britain's largest abortion provider, the BBC reported.

A British ultrantionalist started the hashtag #creepingsharia on Twitter over the supposed image of a mosque on the Twitter homepage - even though the image is in fact of a mausoleum.

In South Africa, the term #rapevideo was trending on Twitter after reports that youths in the township of Soweto had filmed themselves raping a mentally ill 17-year-old girl, and that the video was circulating among school students in the area.